Thank NASA for Baby Formula—And 6 More Government-Funded Inventions

A host of popular products probably wouldn’t be around today if not for robust national investment in science and innovation.

Do you use baby formula? Then you owe thanks to NASA. Did you look up today's forecast on your weather app? Be grateful to the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the CIA.

You probably wouldn’t even be reading this story online without government money for science, and you definitely wouldn’t be sharing it with friends over email, Twitter, or Facebook. Over the decades, U.S. government funding has been responsible for a host of surprising things we may take for granted as features of everyday life.

These and other benefits of a robust national science program will take center stage on April 22, when crowds around the world will rally under the umbrella of a nonpartisan, grassroots group calling itself the March for Science.

Now, thousands of people are expected to gather for the main event in Washington, D.C., and at satellite events in hundreds of cities. Their stated goal is to champion “robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity.”

Here are some of the widely used products that would most likely be missing from our lives without federal research funding.

1. The Internet

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Residents in the village of Embakasi, some 15 miles outside of Nairobi, Kenya, use a solar-powered internet cafe fashioned from a shipping container.

2. Smartphones

You can thank NSF, NASA, and the CIA for the compact devices that allow you to swipe up to read this story and take vacation selfies. In the 1990s, NASA was trying to make miniature cameras for interplanetary spacecraft and ended up developing the image sensors that are now common in cell phones, as well as in webcams and DSLRs.

And researchers at the University of Delaware developed the first touchscreens using funding from the National Science Foundation and the CIA. Though private companies assembled all that technology into a single device, it’s debateable whether we’d have smartphone capabilities today without federally funded projects.

3. GPS Navigation

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An employee drives a Tesla Model S in the Netherlands while using the car's built-in GPS system.

Photograph by Jasper Juinen, Bloomberg via Getty Images

No longer a technology available only to the U.S. military, the global positioning system is now nearly ubiquitous in cars and smartphones. Developed by the Department of Defense in the 1970s, this radionavigation system relies on a constellation of at least 24 satellites. Oh, and then there’s the whole part about launching those satellites into space on government-bought rockets from government-funded air force bases.

5. Bar Codes

You know how annoying it is when a cashier needs to manually type in a product’s identifying number because the bar code is busted? That would be much more common if not for NSF-funded research. The government agency helped develop and improve barcode scanners, starting in the 1970s.

6. Vaccines

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Irene Sanchez, 79, grimaces briefly as she receives a flu shot from a registered nurse at a local drug store.